American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

“a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.”

the mere fact that the United States had such a genocidal weapon in its arsenal would ultimat...

Reasonable people could conclude that America was willing to contemplate an act of Armageddon. “Thus we believe that the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands would be adverse to our interest.”

“Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon. . . .”

if the Super was not a feasible military weapon—because no target was large enough—Oppenheimer and the GAC report argued that it would be both more economical and more effective militarily to accelerate the production of fissionable materials for small, tactical atomic weapons. Together with a buildup of conventional military forces in Western Europe, such “battlefield” atomic weapons would provide the West with a deterrent that was far more effective and credible against any conceivable Soviet invasion force. It was the first serious proposal for nuclear “sufficiency,” a strategic concept that proposed a nuclear arsenal designed for specific tasks rather than one amassed through an irrational race of accumulation.

The debate over the Super had thus crystallized the underlying hysteria of the Cold War and divided policy-makers and politicians into two permanently opposed Cold War camps—arms racers and arms controllers.

to build the Super would almost certainly inspire others to do the same.

Kennan pleaded with Acheson not to support building an even more terrifying weapon of mass destruction—the Super—without first trying to negotiate a comprehensive arms control regime with the Soviets, as Oppenheimer had suggested earlier. Failing that, Kennan argued that the United States should not make the atomic weapon the centerpiece of its national defense.

Like Oppenheimer, he believed that the bomb was ultimately a suicidal weapon and therefore both militarily useless and dangerous. Besides, Kennan was confident that the Soviet Union was politically and economically the weaker of the two adversaries, and that in the long run America could wear down the Soviet system by means of diplomacy and the “judicious exploitation of our strength as a deterrent to world conflict. . . .”

By the end of the decade, America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons would leap from some 300 warheads to nearly 18,000 nuclear weapons. Over the next five decades, the United States would produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and spend a staggering $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons programs. In retrospect—and even at the time—it was clear that the H-bomb decision was a turning point in the Cold War’s spiraling arms race. Like Oppenheimer, Kennan was thoroughly “disgusted.” I. I. Rabi was outraged. “I never forgave Truman,” he said.

Strauss also convinced himself that Oppenheimer was consciously trying to slow work on the thermonuclear bomb. He thought of Oppenheimer as “a general who did not want to fight. Victory could hardly be expected.”

Oppenheimer questioned the sanity of the Air Force’s leadership. He was appalled by their murderous schemes. In 1951, he was shown the Air Force’s strategic war plan—which called for the obliteration of Soviet cities on a scale that shocked him. It was a war plan of criminal genocide. “That was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” he later told Freeman Dyson.

Even without the H-bomb, Conant argued, all but the largest of U.S. cities could easily be wiped out with a single atomic weapon. No one in the room disagreed.

the United States exploded a 10.4-megaton thermonuclear bomb in the Pacific, vaporizing the island of Elugelab.

A week later, Oppenheimer sat grimly with nine other members of yet another panel—the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization—debating whether or not they ought to resign in protest. Many scientists felt the “Mike” test demonstrated that the government simply had no intention of listening to their expert advice.

“unless the contest in atomic armaments is in some way moderated, our whole society will come increasingly into peril of the gravest kind.”

beyond a certain point we cannot ward off the Soviet threat merely by ‘keeping ahead of the Russians.’

Stalin ran a cruel police state, but economically and politically it was a totalitarian state in decay. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors, Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, began a process of de-Stalinization.

After receiving his first briefing on nuclear weapons in September 1953, Khrushchev later recalled, “I couldn’t sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons.”

Washington’s failure to engage Malenkov in meaningful negotiations over nuclear weapons and other issues was a missed opportunity.